Miss Dominion ‘65 at 66

Hamilton’s beauty pageant queen shone in the spotlight, and made her way through darkness

CROWN

Special to The Hamilton Spectator

Her crowning moment: Hamilton's Carol Ann Tidey -- now Carol Mason -- savours the glory as she becomes Miss Dominion of Canada on July 1, 1965, in Niagara Falls.

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Barry Gray/The Hamilton Spectator

Today, she's Carol Mason. But the memories of beauty queen glory come flooding back as she sits in the Mulberry Street Coffee House on James Street North.

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Special to The Hamiltion Spectator

Hamilton's Carol Ann Tidey (middle), the reigning Miss Canada, caused a stir along with two other contestants at the 1965 Miss World pageant in London because of their revealing "peek-a-boo" swimsuits.

You can’t help yourself. First and foremost, you wonder what she will look like all these years later.

You have Googled her maiden name, seen old photos, including one from the Miss World pageant 43 years ago, the bathing suit competition.

“Miss World officials banned peek-a-boo swimsuits in reaction to these worn by four contestants at a rehearsal,” says the webpage. “Miss Canada, Carol Ann Tidey, offered a spectacular view through her net back and sides of her swimsuit.”

“The bathing suits,” she says with a smile. “Yes, that was a big scandal.”

She sits on a green velour couch, back straight, shoulders square.

She is Carol Mason, the former Carol Ann Tidey; Hamilton’s beauty queen, Miss Dominion of Canada 1965, back when the country was still called a dominion.

She turns 66 on Thursday. There is a way about her — the styled long dark hair, pale blue eyes, the deep and serious look on her face broken by a radiant smile.

You think of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, not because she closely resembles Jackie O, but because they both seem to simultaneously convey grace and hurt.

You brought a picture to show her. It is of Carol wearing the Miss Dominion crown, July 1, 1965, in Niagara Falls. Her white-gloved hands hold roses and a golden trophy.

The split-second flash of the camera bulb captures young beauty and possibility. It does not foreshadow the storms ahead.

“Do you have a sister?” asked the police officer standing in Carol’s doorway.

This was Monday night, September 29, 1975. Carol was 28, living with her three kids in Dundas.

“Is she dead?” Carol asked.

She knew police at her door was a bad sign. And on some subconscious level she knew her sister Jill would do it. Ever since she was little, Carol had been like that, seeing things. But her prescience seemed to make this moment even worse.

Walking the hospital corridor, down a ramp to identify the body; the body seemed like a shell, Jill’s soul gone to another place. Carol found that comforting in a way.

It was after midnight. She decided not to tell her mom and dad the news, not yet.

“I wanted to let them have one more peaceful sleep,” she says.

Her family history was one of women overcoming. Carol’s mom, Virginia, had been raised in Hamilton foster homes.

Virginia’s mom — Carol’s grandmother — Frances had been forced to give up Virginia. She had issues, among them a heroin addiction and she did time in the Kingston Prison for Women.

Ultimately with treatment Frances kicked her addiction, and ended up working at Hamilton General Hospital and was CEO of the Hamilton chapter of the CNIB. After being diagnosed with cancer of the larynx she was given months to live but stuck around for another 30 years. And she wrote poetry about her demons:

These are trials o’er which mournful grief

May shed some bitter tears, but never control

And yet when the lone bosom thinks how brief

Are all the woes that rend the tortured soul

No soothing spell, no kind and soft relief

Can heal the spirit wounded, wearied, riven

Then, in its strengthened faith it turns to Heaven.

When Carol’s mom, Virginia, was 16, she took a bus to Toronto to give birth to a son at a home for unwed mothers. She brought him back to Hamilton and the boy was raised by her foster parents.

Carol was her born when Virginia and husband Lloyd Tidey, a Stelco man, lived at Wentworth and Delaware.

Virginia thought Carol was the most beautiful baby she’d ever seen and proved it when Carol won the Ancaster Fall Fair’s Beautiful Baby Contest.

When the family lived on West Third she won the Canadian leg of the Miss Sixteen of America contest at the CHTV Club 11 dance party, as Virginia and Lloyd beamed on television.

She attended Gaye Modeling Agency on the Mountain. Two years later, she graced the stage as Miss Dominion. Her whole family was there: parents, brother John, sister Jill and boyfriend Gino, her sweetheart at Westmount high school, who leapt to his feet when she was crowned the winner.

Carol was in bed by midnight, up at 4 a.m., then flew to Saskatoon for a country fair. That afternoon she was gingerly walking through a farmer’s field in heels, bathing suit, her banner and cowboy hat.

“I didn’t want to wear a bathing suit but didn’t have the sense to say no.”

It was fun, too, the fancy hotel room with a big bowl of fresh fruit waiting for her.

“I called home and I said, ‘Mom they’re treating me like a star.’ And she said, ‘That’s because you are a star!”

She went on tour across Canada, usually town fairs where Miss Dominion of Canada was a big deal, and car shows, trade shows, the lobster festival out east. She rode limousines, attended events in the U.S. with celebrities like Paul Anka, actor Lee Majors — “tall and stunning” — and alligator-shoe wearing Broadway Joe Namath.
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There was one musician, a singer who was a regular on the Ed Sullivan show, who was the rare celebrity that hit on her. He was arrogant and Carol rebuffed him. He then made a point of sniffing that, fine, he would go home and “make love to my girlfriend on a sable coat.”

She placed in the top 10 in Miss Universe in Miami Beach at the end of the summer but still felt shy in the spotlight. By the time she had placed sixth at Miss World in London that fall, she was into the role, confident.

The best part was connecting with the other contestants, and gaining self-confidence, realizing that the girl from Steeltown belonged in the room with big shots from Hollywood and politics.

And yet even with Carol’s taste of life on the big stage, and the opportunity it represented, her instincts pulled her home. She had always yearned to have kids, lots of them.

Engaged at 19, she married Gino before finishing high school and had children right away — Gina and Angela by the time she was 21, and Rachel six years later.

Her first marriage fell apart. Soon after that, Carol’s sister, Jill, jumped to her death from the 15th floor of an apartment building near the Claremont Access. Jill had told her psychiatrist she wanted to do it. The doctor, Jill once told Carol, challenged her to “go ahead.”

Jill’s suicide changed their mother, Virginia, forever, and infused darkness into Carol’s life. Carol remarried and had four more kids: Alexandra, Lia, Julian, and Xenos. That marriage also did not end well.

She had come of age during the birth of modern feminism. Not long after her Miss Dominion tours, back home in Hamilton, she had received a letter in which a woman ridiculed Carol for having been paraded around at fairs “like cattle.”

She knew there was some truth to that but at the same time felt the cruelty in the message, the desire to hurt. Ultimately, she believed that hardcore “women’s libbers” suffered from a lack of compassion, in addition to an unjustified hatred of men.

As she raised her kids in the wake of broken marriages, on occasion she met young women with university degrees. When she sensed arrogance in them, pretentiousness, it angered her, made her feel defensive.

She worked as a school board trustee, dental office manager, did some modelling, and worked on political campaigns provincially and federally.

She took a few courses in neuropsychology at McMaster, as though trying to master the intricacies of her own mind, and that of her family, to try and bridge science and the spirituality she felt deeply.

When her youngest, Xenos, was nine, she took him to a lecture at the university. And she sat him down one night to help him with a project he was doing on the brain.

“She taught me everything she knew about the brain, an overview of neuroanatomy and physiology,” says Xenos, now 24. “She was not highly educated but she is a very smart person. She is able to distill it all.”

Into middle age, Carol struggled to come to terms with the pain in her life — Jill, and betrayal in relationships that had wounded her and those around her.

She thought about how Jill had ended her pain. That could not be her option. Not with her kids depending on her.

She thought about her grandmother, Frances.

“She was my hero; she had overcome so much, had healed herself, physically and spiritually. I needed to find that road myself.”

The catharsis Carol sought was a self-published book of spiritual poetry and reflection that she titled Circle of Light. She only printed a few copies for family. “Thus enter into the darkness of deceit,” she wrote in one passage. “He walks alone and cold/blinded by the mist of rage.”

She described dark corners in her life but also of finding wisdom and revelation: “Her love conquers and vanquishes … now they rest at peace within the love of their children, and within the golden light of each other.”

The last 14 years she has been with her partner, George Tracz, a retired professor at the University of Toronto. She has lived in his city during that time but wants to return home to Hamilton. Toronto has never stopped feeling foreign.

At 18, she knew everything. Today, she is wise enough to know that she knows little, apart from a few truths.

“One thing I believe is that you need to find your core values, and if you go against them, you are damaging yourself and people around you. To me it’s about leading a principle-driven life and letting go of the outcomes. And to remember that the conscious mind — the physical things around us — are only a small part of what we actually can perceive.”

All she ever wanted was kids and that they become fulfilled, compassionate people. Carol stuck to her story. There are no regrets.

Her seven children range in age from 24 to 45 and live in Ancaster, Boston, Hamilton, Oakville, Port Dover, Vancouver and Vicenza, Italy. Her 13th grandchild is due soon.

Her son Xenos attends a joint program between Harvard and MIT. He is on track to becoming a neurologist. He has not forgotten his first teacher.

“That lesson about the brain she gave me when I was nine, it was the seminal moment in my interest in the subject.”

Daughter Angela, 44, a doctor at the Hamilton Urban Core Community Health Centre, says her mom has sacrificed for them.

“She has given up so much but she reminds me that that’s what she’s here for.”

Angela is a lot like Carol, sensitive and attuned to everything. She carries tributes to her late aunt — she named her daughter Jill — and her mom, whom she honours in her surname: Dr. Angela Carol.

“I show my daughter a picture of Snow White,” says Angela, “and I say look how beautiful she is — but not just to look at. My mom taught us to have beauty in your heart. And I think my mom is beautiful.”

A Spectator photographer arrives to take pictures of Carol at the Mulberry Street Coffee House. The place has had many lives; been hotels with names like the Drake and Siesta, been a flophouse, and quarters for soldiers from the Armoury across the street on James North.

The backdrop is exposed brick and worn wood, the popular café’s weathered look not a sign of age and disrepair but life and beauty.

Prior to the shoot, you show Carol the photo of Miss Dominion, 1965. What does she see in the face of the 18-year old?

“I see wonder. And fear.”

You have looked up the definition of the word dominion. It is biblical, Latin for dominus, which means master, as in “that which is mastered.”

The photographer poses Carol, who seems shy, but only for a moment.

The camera churns, flashes pop. The smile is free and easy. No fear. Dominus. Funny, all these years later the title is still hers.

(1) Comments

By Glenda|JULY 15, 2014 12:57 PM

Just venturing back in time, 49 years ago, when I was crowned Miss Lansdowne Fair Queen by Carol Ann. This title had given me the opportunity to complete in the Miss Eastern Ontario Pageant, coming in 10th. I can remember how charming and elegant Carol Ann was that day after having the exciting opportunity of riding in her limo to Gananoque, On to the then - Golden Apple Inn - where we enjoyed a lovely dinner. I have now been asked to re-attend the 150 Anniversary of the Lansdowne Fair, this Saturday, July 19th where I'll be able to re-live this happy event, without Carol Ann, and I shall cherish the fond memories of her warm and welcoming personality. Glenda Fulford-Napper, Brockville, ON. (photo on Facebook)